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Americas editor @theeconomist
london
Joined September 2010
*Some Personal News*. After 10yrs as a sci/tech writer, I'm taking on a new challenge as @TheEconomist's Americas editor, running our LatAm & Canada coverage . The potential for this kind of cross-pollination is one of my favourite things about the paper. Can't wait to get going.
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This week's issue of @TheEconomist goes big on solar. A quick thread on everything that's in the issue, which is one of the most exciting, optimistic covers I can remember us running
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if this GameStop nonsense carries on I can't help but feel that the government should step in and seize the memes of production.
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A computational biologist called Colby Ford used DeepMind's AlphaFold software to predict the shape of Omicron's spike in November, based on its genome sequence, long before the structure was determined physically. The prediction was extremely accurate
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I wrote about one of my deeper obsessions again this week, the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, perhaps the most important company on Earth now. Two years ago TSMC was a relatively obscure contract manfacturer. Now it holds the top of The Economist's homepage
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BREAKING. notice from Matt Hancock, signed March 20th, provides legal backing for the NHS to set aside the duty of confidentiality in response to covid-19. Means NHS orgs and GPs may share whatever patient data they want, with whoever they want, as long as it is to fight covid
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We have put civil liberties on the cover this week. Working together with excellent colleagues around the world, I wrote about the different ways that governments are using digital infrastructure to handle the pandemic
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Singapore's Ministry of Health just announced its largest ever single-day rise of covid-19 infections, 1426. That's worrying considering how under-control Singapore seemed to have things. The disease is spreading in worker's dormitories
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Palantir has started working on the NHS' data backbone, data work triggered by the covid-19 response. My story
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NFTs are, more than anything, a demonstration of the total loss of democratic regulatory control over the internet. This is obviously fraud, but no one can do anything about it. It will keep happening.
Even the dotcom bubble was never this bad, and that had some pretty bad/stupid people.
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if bitcoin is so a) useful and b) decentralised then how come a single dude can lower it’s price by 20% with one tweet?.
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There is no take I disagree with more strongly at the moment than this one. Trump and Brexit are not singular tech-made aberrations. They’re deep consequences of the way the UK/US have been run for decades.
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to all the automated contact tracing advocates: South Korea is doing this right. they have turned almost all interactions with public spaces and institutions into a chance to screen and test. they are, to the greatest extent possible, surveilling THE VIRUS, not its human carriers.
🇰🇷041320 South Korea #COVID19 Updates:. SK's Legislative Election early voting is currently underway. Their ingenuity SHINES. Aggressive screening AT THE POLLING BOOTHS which means not only are they keeping everyone safe, but they are also using the election to FIND new cases.
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the more i report on and learn about contact tracing apps (or proximity notification apps), the more convinced I am that they flat out will not work. centralised or decentralised.
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i have spent a solid week reporting on the role of data infrastructure in fighting covid. tens of calls, hundreds of emails. preview: contact tracing apps are bullshit!.
Wow! .Singapore 🇸🇬 stands out as a great success story fighting #coronavirus. One reason is their efficient contact tracing. They are now making the contact tracing app freely available to the World . 👏👏👏 Great service!.
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Minor note: the official who is supposed to be running overseeing the export controls against Russia's technological systems, Alan Estevez, has not yet been confirmed by the Senate. Given the unprecedented, complex nature of the tech sanctions, that ought to be fixed.
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images of lunar surface are beaming back to Earth for the first time in 40 yrs. I see little coverage in it in English-language media, & none of the social media jubilation that went with the Mars landers. Is this because it's a Chinese mission? Or cos the Moon is boring?
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if there's another energy source which lets you draw cute pictures with infrastructure that can be seen from space, I don't know it
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the west built an economy so amazingly optimised that it tricked itself into thinking it was robust.
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some poor soul has written a jolly interesting briefing on the "creator economy" for The Economist. we may never know their name
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so apparently Sofia the robot just issued a fucking press release with "a little help from her human friends" & it's about some gd artwork that she "did" that, of course, is being sold as an NFT. if this is making me this mad just imagine what's gonna happen when @timmaughan sees.
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I wrote about the rise and fall of the UK's Government Digital Service this week, in the context of a country that is failing the data management challenges of the pandemic. It didn't used to be this way
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It’s the northern hemisphere solstice today. So I wrote an essay about solar power, and how it’s is going to change everything
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today I found out, while reading our annual report, that @TheEconomist is free-to-read if you arrive from a Russian or Ukrainian IP address. This is cool
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fireworks going off in lerwick in the shetlands, one of the most northernly places in the UK. The celebration of Trump’s defeat is broad.
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personally can’t stand obsequious tip-mongering American service, and find people who love it very weird.
One thing Europeans don't realize is how terrible the service is in Europe. Because they grew up in it, they think it's normal. You only realize this once you live long enough outside Europe. No it's not normal waiters are grumpy 24/7 and fight with customers.
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a woman streaming aerobics while a coup happens is the most internet thing i've seen this week.
Una mujer hizo su clase de aerobic sin darse cuenta de que estaban dando el golpe de Estado en Myanmar. Y pues puede verse como el convoy de militares llega al parlamento.
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3 months work: special report on the electricity grid & its inescapable, there-is-no-alternative role in reducing carbon emissions. to read all 10k words, start here: TLDR: grids are the planet's biggest machines. climate change means they must be remade
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no news story has ever made me feel as stupid as AGI/OpenAI drama. i see oodles of smart people on my feed caring a lot and analysing a lot, but despite trying I just can’t get past thinking it’s all absolute bollocks. starting to believe I’m simply too dumb to understand it.
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UPDATE: I FOIed the DHSC communications around the decision to publish the COPI notices that Matt Hancock signed. It's a fascinating little look into the relationship between the Prime Minister's office and the Department of Health.
BREAKING. notice from Matt Hancock, signed March 20th, provides legal backing for the NHS to set aside the duty of confidentiality in response to covid-19. Means NHS orgs and GPs may share whatever patient data they want, with whoever they want, as long as it is to fight covid
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interesting aspect of the Djokovic case is that he provided antibody levels to the state government medical panel in order to get his visa, measured by blood sample. measuring antibody level is a far *more accurate* measure of a person's potential infectiousness than vax status.
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waiting with baited breath like the nerd I am to see whether the US deploys its "whole-Russia foreign direct product rule" in response to the breakaway recognition. Russia apparently well prepped for economic sanctions. I think FDPR will be very different, potentially huge impact.
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I wrote about BeiDou, China's constellation of navigation satellites. China has understood the strategic value of digital sovereignty for decades, in this case over location data, because it has operated without it. The West is only just coming around
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Wrote about BioNTech's project to standardise vax production into shipping containers. Might seem a bit gimmicky, but I genuinely think that reducing the cost of replicating and distributing manufacturing process knowledge is a huge, world-changing idea
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A lot of mainstream media are reporting on NFTs for the first time this week (us included). It is irresponsible not to include information on the energy requirements of #cryptoart, and its implied carbon footprint. @memotv has done great work on this
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my fave part of sitting in the exit row is imagining the sheer thrill of fecking a door out of a plane into a clear blue sky at 15,000 feet and descending
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it seems that the only way to get the Cabinet Office to even *respond* to a Freedom of Information Act request is to get the ICO to instruct them to do so. the defacto standard is for the government to be in breach of the law. the regulator is not regulating, it is coaxing.
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i was talking to Taiwan's CDC yesterday (they're very open if you bother to actually talk to them). they said that their cell data + national health fusion had only been helpful in literally one case.
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@COdendahl @Eaterofsun The Economist rarely goes this big on a story. That we did is a reflection of solar's importance, now but particularly in the future. If we're right, and obviously I think we are, then humanity's relationship with energy will soon change, dramatically and for the better.
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i wrote about contact tracing apps this week. their value, if any, is to optimise a large testing regime. more interesting is the massive sensor network Apple and Google can whip up just by agreeing on a protocol. it exposes their power. 3.5bn phones suddenly proximity tracking.
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Apple is hiring a RISC-V developer to work on embedded systems across all their devices. No sooner is the Intel replacement complete than Apple is looking for more freedom in their silicon design. Remarkable
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The data protection debate is stuck in a rut. We are all focused on data itself, arguing about who can collect what, its monetary value, what metaphors to use. but to me the most important factor is not data itself, but control of channels through which to record human behaviour.
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what's happening in Hong Kong is all the more horrifying because it was completely avoidable. The death rate is ascending at beginning-of-pandemic rates. Complete outlier in equivalent Asian states now. Will soon pass worst UK death rate from pre-vax times. Why? Old not vaxxed
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Dom Cummings had a vision for the digitisation of the machinery of state: seeing rooms, data-driven efficiency, policy and governance based on real-time data flows. @KatHall42 and I investigated what he really achieved while in power
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am pretty concerned about the potential for false positives from this sort of tech adding a undue burden to the healthcare system. None of this stuff is clinically validated. Same goes for digital contract tracing tech.
Thermometers with facial recognition are installed in buses in south China to take body temperature in seconds and issue an alert if abnormal data is detected #FightVirus
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This week I wrote about a tension inherent to domestic surveillance in China. By legislating for weakened security of digital systems in order to monitor its own people, China leaves itself open to foreign intelligence services
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@ylecun @_KarenHao Yann, with the best will in the world, if there are real errors of fact that TR won't correct, publish a list of them. Anything else is smoke.
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these words of Jonathan’s are very fine, and worth your time.
I have been struggling to articulate the complex emotions I've been feeling since Saturday morning as a Jew, a liberal/progressive, a believer that Palestinians and Jews have a right to a homeland, to safety and dignity. A thread 1/.
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This week I wrote about China's attempts to use digital contact tracing to keep the covid19 infection curve tamped down while simultaneously restarting its economy. It's messy, not the joined-up hypersurveillance regime the West often imagines
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my own opinion: the technology community should be focusing on building tool to scale the work of *human* contact tracing teams, make it more efficient. they should not be trying to pull the whole contact tracing system onto the smartphone sensor network.
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look, say what you like about @TheEconomist but we are at least willing to laugh at ourselves
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“. and the contact tracing AI chased the entire population into quarantine, cycle upon cycle, fed by false positives, until everyone forgot why this was happening and started worshipping the UMS delivery system as a god.”.
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the right answer is: "no google, i refuse to teach your machines about the edges of things for free".
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I wrote the essay, Sun Machines, asking what might curb solar's exponential growth, and what might support it. The more I looked, the more I found evidence for solar's continued expansion, particularly in India, Africa, and batteries' parallel price drop.
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I've written about Rishi Sunak's big AI plans, and what they will need to be successful
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proof, as if it was needed, that GPT-4 has ingested a vast number of copyrighted texts.
New paper out today, asking: What books has ChatGPT/GPT-4 *memorized*? A LOT. Harry Potter, Pride & Prejudice, 1984, LotR, Hunger Games, GoT, 50 Shades of Grey, Dune. Memorization is linked to web popularity--lots of old classics + new sci-fi/fantasy. 1/6
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[irish twitter announcement]. it has come to my attention that someone has deepfaked Pint Man into a Trump CNBC address. message ends
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NYT about to straight up double its all-time carbon emissions with this auction. cool cool cool.
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I am seeing a lot of anger about Palantir working on NHS data. That is fair, Palantir has a horrible reputation, and works on projects that run completely directly against my beliefs. But there are a few reasons to at least be open to a company like this wrangling NHS data:.
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two NYT headlines about contact tracing, two identical BS Asia tropes in the second clause of the first sentence. it's like a recipe (cc @Whitey_chan)
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Been reporting this one in the background for a while: an unintended consequence of the American government's attack on Huawei has been to shut its own companies out of high-tech standards meetings. I love the cartoon by @d_urbo_design
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abundantly clear, to me at least, that privacy issues are not the main challenge with contact tracing apps. the biggest problem is figuring out a mapping for location/proximity>infection that is accurate enough not to create a dangerous wave of false positives.
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for people who care about threats digital systems pose to democracy, THIS is the horse to back. Ad tech business-as-usual is a far bigger problem than Cambridge Analytica ever was. This group is trying to force the UK regulator to fix a problem it has already acknowledged.
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The physical structure of Omicron's spike protein was published on December 21st. Knowing the structure is important for understanding the mechanisms by which the variant infects and spreads. Here it is What's remarkable is the structure was predicted.
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easy to automate: other people's jobs, of which I have no experience, nor understanding of the nuance of the labour involved. impossible to automate: my job.
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well these are totally lovely.
“Talking stamps“ from Bhutan, 1973. Little vinyl postage stamps that are fully playable. They contain different Bhutanese folk songs, the national anthem or a brief history of the country.
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just found out that an excellent colleague writes directly into the bonkers clunky old Economist CMS, with page fit/column view ON and zoomed in 95% and my respect for the true diversity of individual preferences is only just outweighing my horror.
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dear governments: launching a contract tracing app that works badly and harms privacy is not the PR win some of you seem to think it is.
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no single person tweeting their wordle chart is spoiling the day's game. but collectively, everyone tweeting out their wordle charts is spoiling the day's game!
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I went off in our leader pages about the way America is dealing with TikTok and Chinese tech . we describe USG’s approach with phrases like: . “jingoistic opportunism”.“nationalist whack-a-mole”.“feudal lord”. this is about as outraged as we get
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have come to believe that, even when the dangers of climate change are set aside, energy technology is and will be a dramatically more important and powerful driver of improvement of human life on this planet than information technology, including AI. change my mind?.
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Overnight the Russian military took control Europe’s largest nuclear plant, Zaporizhzhia. All but 1 of its 6 reactors are now shut down. Safety systems undamaged. Prospect of radioactive leak is low, but Putin now controls 1/5 of Ukraine’s elec supply
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very hard to understand where people like this are coming from. London is delightful
Four more years of the divisive and hate-filled Sadiq Khan. London will continue its rapid decline. Many folk, including me, won’t be here by the next election. Why stay for no go zones, exploding crime, anarchists running riot on the streets, a war on cars and dying nightlight.
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@youngvulgarian few thrills like accidentally going 43 in a 40 on the approach to blackwall tunnel.
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Becoming clear to me that legal risk is the number one barrier to adoption of generative AI. Fortune 500s are stuffed with lawyers telling their firms not to take this kind of risk.
PSA: Valve has been quietly banning newly submitted Steam games using AI-created art assets - if submitters can't prove they have rights for the assets used to train the algorithms:
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is this really a mystery? America and China both have hundreds of millions speaking one language in one country. that + internet = scale. surely other factors too, but this has always seemed like a clear one to me.
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completely agree with this FT editorial on NHS data centralisation "There is no good reason for rushing an exercise with vast privacy implications.". exactly
if they go ahead with this the results are *extremely* predictable: a story or series of stories WILL come out about how this rapidly-centralised database has been shared w ~bad company~. gov will scrap the whole thing, setting digital health back years, again. just do it right.
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installing the Facebook app on the my phone for the first time in at least 5 years just for the pure pleasure of denying access to tracking using new iOS feature.
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signal has now been the most downloaded iPhone app in America for a straight week
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